Hey, I'll try that. However, I figured that if it were a timing test I'd have to compare 100 repeats of everything, and that included construction of the RA. Otherwise it's an apples-to-oranges comparison where one method had the chance to do up-front work and the others didn't. I'll post benchmarks on that in a few minutes though and we can see if it makes a difference.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other